Friday, April 29, 2011

Adventure Riff - Titanic 3

Now that this is officially released and available on Netflix Instant Watch, I feel down-right inspired to make a terrible Titanic-based adventure (don't worry Moby Dick, you're up next, I'm sure). So the Titanic II happened a hundred years after the first (the fictional boat, not the terrible movie), and you can only assume that global warming kills it this time (it does). In the aftermath humanity has decided to wait another 100 years to build the Titanic 3, this time building the largest luxury spacecraft to ever be constructed by man.

You are lucky enough to have made it onto the maiden voyage of this historic flight. The Titanic 1 went down like a chump before we knew ice was dangerous. The Titanic 2 went down, also chump-like as a result of extremely poor acting and even worse CGI effects. The Titanic 3 is the biggest ship there is! She is unsinkable! There are no icebergs in space! Whether you're the rich aristocrat who made all his money through selling anti-radiation cell chip cases, the hapless navigator who failed out of flight school but who's related to one of the shareholders of the project, or a lowly nuclear waste shoveler strictly confined to the lower deck (after all, people will freak if they see all your mutations), it is your lucky day!
Until you get a little too close to that asteroid field, of course. No one told the captain AI about that asteroid field, not that an asteroid could possibly pierce the hide of the biggest spaceship EVER...

So, once the asteroid hits and tears off a chunk of the ship (along with a ton of poor non-people), the real fun begins. The AI that captains the Titanic 3 of course has no way to deal with the possibility of something crashing into the ship. The crew don't really know how to fly the thing without the AI telling them what to do, and there's virtually no hope for relief to come and save the passengers. What you ultimately get is a race to the few remaining escape pods still attached to the thing as the AI desperately attempts to keep all on board since it doesn't konw anything is wrong. Think of it as System Shock 2 meets Paranoia. As always with stupid one-shot scenarios I dream up, there's only one system that can handle all the fun - Dread. Bonus points if you play when you're actually on a boat (especially if you use Dread)!

Thanks for the heads up about this coming to Netflix streaming. My wife had heard about it and wanted to submit it for inclusion in our monthly Bad Movie Night. Knowing it is on Netflix streaming makes that a whole lot easier.